


cadaver city

by bladeCleaner



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-25
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 22:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/816592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bladeCleaner/pseuds/bladeCleaner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>caught in between alive and dead, aradia must choose; her muddled sense of temporal inevitability (so-called fate), or her friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. chapter one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionpyh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionpyh/gifts).



The Lord of Time-her ancestor’s Master-did something to her. She can still feel time tick away at the back of her head like a second pulse, but she can’t go forward. She cannot accelerate, only cast herself further back in time.

When he'd cornered her in a dream bubble, away from her friends, she didn't think this is what she'd be subjected to.

Lord English’s private storage city; his corpse clean-up. This is what the Maid of Time has been reduced to. Most of the time, they’re unrecognizable troll/human bodies; and sometimes, if she’s lucky, they just turn out to be skeletons. Those go into the trays of de-greasing solution she's set up in the basement of Block 12. She doesn't want to know why there are ready-made supplies everywhere, if she just bothers to look-jars of formaldehyde underneath beds, aneurysm hooks hanging from the rafters with rope and drawers hanging out with gloves.

She’d extracted skeletons during her archaeology digs-but nothing quite like this, nothing like-

Nothing like a human. She doesn’t know how their bodies work, very well-the first time she was caught off-guard by the sheer smell, an entire city worked over with the scent of rotting flesh, but something amongst it had caught her nose. It smelled like a mix between hoofbeast and lusii, the blood more tangy and iron and mercury-like-

She'd closed her eyes tight and recalled the way Sollux had looked, _smelled_ when he'd died-

She doesn’t want to remember. She wants to pull that impassivity to her again, that emotionless veil that coloured everything when she was dead.

The truth: if she hadn’t tricked Sollux-

If-

She slams the steel table with her fist and she keeps slamming it against the edge until she notices that the side of her wrist has split open. No matter how many times she harms herself the wounds always disappear the next day; like clockwork, like majyyk.

Maroon drips down her wrist like a blood-wash waterfall. Thick droplets clump together on the grey floor like paint splattering and she does not record with any amount the tenuous sound of the dripping. There are tools everywhere; thread, needles-she found anesthetic in a chamber underneath the sewer tunnels. She’s split her wrist open again. She wants to just leave it to fester, but it might hinder her work.

She injects herself with anaesthetic, right in the wound, wincing a little as the steel needle slides in between fat and flesh. After having hundreds-no-thousands of corpses to experiment on, she’s become an expert on the physical anatomy of her own body, if not necessarily a novice on the human’s.

She watches emotionlessly as she threads navy blue thread through the flaps of her gaping wound, pulling her skin together again to seal the cut.

\--

Above her there’s nothing but endless static-grey sky, stuck somewhere between daylight and evening. There is no Sun, not even red or green. It is constantly dim. She’s explored every inch of this city and there’s still more to go-

She’s covered most of the Eastern perimeter. Most of the bodies are stacked on the pavement-

She nearly slips on the wet grime layering the stairs. The train tunnels haven’t ever been used; the tracks are rusted over and over-wrought with rats. Old signs pointing to ablution blocks dangle from their steel-iron supporting beams; resembling the limp limbs of sopor addicts over-dosed, their arms hanging out of their recuperacoons.

Outside there’s a dozen buildings, burnt to mere skeletons of their architectural beginnings. She should be amused by the irony. She isn’t.

For some reason it just makes her think of an old…frenemy-someone who would crack a glass bottle over the doors of a bar just to have every eye swivel towards her. If Serket were here she’d fill up all the empty with her brashness and bold words, regardless of any sort of meaning. Rose would classify her as a stereotypical scenery-chewer drama queen and she’d be right. As much as they hated each other, she misses her now. Even her ghost would rattle a few chains just to be annoying. Here the bodies never wake or even make a sound. The only thing she can hear is her own voice, and _oh_ , is she tired of her own shouts into the void.

\--

It must be easier, preparing a human for a corpse party than it would be a troll; she’d thought about it. The sawing of the horns-that much she’d heard from Kanaya-required much strength. Apparently to be delivered to the kismesis, their last, final weapon dismantled, the only funeral procedure trolls seemed to honor universally. However, with humans, there was no cartilage to be sawn through, no blood to be drawn to check for hemotype-they were all the same candy red as Karkat’s.

She’s sawn off more horns than she can remember, by now.

She sets to work on another body. She knows, almost certainly, that she will be able to know a troll’s body inside and out before her time here is up. The blood-pusher, the oculars, the collection of horns stacking up in her abode. She’s good at this; almost too good at it.

She chooses to sleep in the tunnels the most. The dank darkness comforts her, makes her think that one day she’ll wake up, flick a switch and find that she’s in her hive. Anywhere but here, in this endless purgatory.

\--

She wants to say that she’s lost count of how long she’s been here. But it’s been precisely 6 weeks, 1 day, 12 hours, 11 minutes, 11 seconds, 25 milliseconds she’s been dropkicked into a hell of her own fantasies.

There’s no shortage of clocks here. Throughout the city she can hear them ticking like a mockery of the powers she’s lost. The city’s ruins; rubble and skeleton remains of what seems to have been a human metropolis. But the clocks in every room have stayed intact. She breaks through doors and finds more barren walls with floors full of burn marks. The grandfather clocks peppered through every building are, however, still grand and tall; pendulums swinging away without pause.

Lord English had sent her exactly one missive.

“I WANT.

TO PLAY A GAME.”

He wants her to find her clock of Judgment. Then he’ll open the gates that stand in the Western Perimeter and allow her to escape into the Furthest Ring.

The problem is she has no idea where to start.

\--

2 months. 3 days. 5 hours. 9 minutes. 11 seconds. 2 milliseconds.

When she first spots them, she almost cries for joy.

“Wake up! Wake up, guys-I’m here-"

She spots Kanaya first. Kanaya, who’d always been a friend: who’d Vriska had undoubtedly told to hate her but offered to help her at the start. Who had told her she’d be there for her.

“Maryam-wake up,” she rubs at her shoulder. When she doesn’t wake up, a nagging feeling begins at the base of her cranium and grows. She rushes over to Terezi. She doesn’t look at all peaceful even in sleep, the skeletal smile plastered all over her face.

“Wake up. _WAKE UP_ ,” she screams, and the joke isn’t funny anymore. This is exactly the kind of thing that they would fake, just to freak her out-any minute now Terezi’s going to jump up and crow, “I thought you wanted a corpse party!” and she’s going to hit her in the face and laugh. Like the old days, when they were still friends, before the Charge debacle, before Vriska went AWOL, before she ever knew she was going to die before a rustblood’s time.

\--

When she lies down, flayed down in the rubble, amongst the bodies, she does not consider it a trick. She does not think: _maybe they’re not from my timeline._

There are crusted tear stains on her face and she breathes through her mouth, gasping for air.

She lies down there for days.

Then she picks herself up again, steady as anything, and tenderly picks up Sollux’ body. His, she will finish first.

She walks six blocks carrying him until she reaches her working space. He’s even lighter than she remembers. She takes out her toolkit, aneurysm hooks and jars of formaldehyde, and thinks back to how she knew, almost instinctively, what to do when she’d spotted that first corpse.

\--

You remember how eerily calm you’d been when you’d killed your first troll.

She was a rustlet, same as you, and unfortunately for her, her Clouder hadn’t been Terezi Pyrope. You’d taken her down with your whip around her neck. You hadn’t even registered that she’d stopped breathing until you’d bent down in a crouch and checked for a pulse.

“Terezi? It’s fine, I can clean up here,” you’d managed to mutter into your headset’s built-in mic, before slinging it around your collar. Her neck was deeply lacerated and you could see her blood-the same colour as yours-begin to pool around her hair. Her deep-set eyes were still open, staring blankly at the night sky. You don’t even remember what this scenario was, some bullshit Trollruto ripoff where you had to get the bells from her pocket to become a ninja. Terezi was only free for this session and you hadn’t seen her for sweeps.

The fascination you feel tingles in your arm. You expected your first kill to be joyous; heck, you were long overdue at five sweeps, if you compared yourself to Vriska-but no. There’s just a scientific, rational intrigue in the way that bodies work. The cold body is beautiful in the way ruins are beautiful, both studies in destruction.

Even with your lowblood’s temperament, your bloodpusher is pulsing through your ears, sending an earthquake shake through your entire body whenever it beats, and you’re thinking how easy it would be to just track down her Clouder and-

You hadn’t been calm after that, you’d been _ecstatic_.

You’d felt the best you’d ever felt in your life. Vriska had told you about how it felt, before, _c’mon, don’t you just want to try, it’s the only time you’ll ever feel above someone for once, lowblood-_

_the fucking adrenaline rush in your fucking veins, Megido, it’s like being electrified, like being god-_

Then her ghost had whispered in your ear and you’d nearly jumped. She wasn’t murmuring anything too interesting; just alternating between cursing you out and weeping uncontrollably for her lusus. Then she’d wailed, “I want my fucking _moirail_ ,” and you stiffened.

You’d removed the whip curled around her neck and coiled it up neatly, attaching it to your belt again. You were wearing your Indiana Jones get-up that day, complete with ridiculous coat.

You’d wondered how to dispose of a body.

You closed her eyes with the heel of your hand and photographed her sign. Later that day you’d ask Sollux to post it under an anonymous name with the location attached, untraceable. You made sure her moirail knew.

You almost stayed up past dawn to research embalming; body disposal and funeral techniques. (Hanging around Sollux, you’d picked up a thing or two about hacking past the lowblood data encryption the Empire always put on jadeblood-and-lower-bought husktops.)

\--

When she’s finished with all the bodies, she allows herself time to think and really consider.

\--

It's more like the slow collapse of a tiny rock hitting a thousand others, eventually knocking down a boulder: she's lost them all. Sick with anhedonia and corpse-scent she abandoned them to the cruel machinations of her own element, convinced it was fate, giving up on any possibility of escaping. 


	2. chapter two

You see him again, when you dream. You’re in your God Tier outfit and the world around you is dark. The wings you love so much flicker paper-thin and vibrant against the heavy black. He’s floating, his eyes trailing psionics. You're reminded of the two of you, in front of the Green Sun, waiting for your allies.

“Hi, AA."

“You’re dead." You were never really good with small talk.

As abruptly, he says, “Why did you trick me?”

“I’ve told you why.”

“I thought we were moirails.”

“We were.”

"Half the time I didn't understand you," he says, frustratedly, running his hand through his hair, careful not to catch his fingers on his horns. "And we picked the fucking _understanding-and-trust quadrant_ , AA, that's not natural."

You smile. "I am kind of an enigma."

He snorts. "That's an understatement. I'm one of the greatest hackers in the world-suck it, KK-I could hack into the Imperial drone rosters and you would still be the hardest thing I'd ever have to parse."

You don't say anything, just trail maroon glitter across the darkness of your dreamscape. It's empty, so empty, and you remember one thing Equius told you before he went: that whenever he kissed you, he felt like he was kissing a black hole.

"We were going to save the world," you say. "Understanding me was irrelevant."

"AA-what-our moirallegiance wasn't important enough for you to just-"

"Be honest?"

He looks confused, then angry.

"The voices told me I couldn't let my feelings get in the way."

"So you tricked me into a game that ended up with most of our friends dead."

"I'm sorry."

"That's just it, AA, I can't feel that you are. Even when you were alive again I didn't know how you felt at all."

You hover hesitantly, looking at him, remembering the way he used to laugh before all of this, before you died. He doesn't say anything either, just looks at you sadly.

You say, after a while, "Pale for you. Maybe you don't believe me. But I am. Always was."

He smiles faintly and begins to fade. You don't move, you don't smile, just say, "Don't go."

"You've gotten good at leaving people behind, AA," he says, wistfully, "Maybe I should practice the same thing."

Then he disappears.

\--

Here's another fist in your face: the scent of sollux's hive, the faint undercurrent of honey, the way it always smelled like it was a fuel can away from a forest fire. He always told you which wires were live and which weren't and watching the electric current zap through them lulled you to sleep on days you stayed over. He had two beanbags-one red, one blue. You'd always plopped on the red one, cushy and comfortable. If he didn't have enough pillows to spare for a pile you would drag him on the blue one for a feelings jam.

On nights when you spent the day, you'd always see a slat of sunlight slanting, burning its way on the floor before sollux had the presence of mind to move from his husktop and fully block off his windows with steel.

One day, near-dawn almost, you'd been half-asleep. Your eyes blissfully closed, listening to the tapping of his keys, sometimes manic, sometimes slow like an orchestra building up to a roaring crescendo, then as a finishing touch he'd hit the enter key with finality.

You almost drifted off to sleep when you'd registered, distantly, the scrape of his chair. A moment later and his lips brushed the side of your forehead, so faintly you wondered if it'd happened, then his soft whisper, "I love you, AA."

Utterly content, a little confused but touched, you'd fallen asleep.

When you'd woken up, it'd been late: the jade and rose moons were already risen almost to their zenith. In front of you, sollux was still tapping away. You'd mumbled something incoherent and he'd said, near fondness, "And I'm supposed to be the manic one. How much sleep have you gotten in the last sweep, Ms. Always Responsible?"

You'd shaken your head and said, "An archaeologist never sleeps when there's ruins to uncover."

You could hear him roll his eyes at his screen from across the room. "They're ruins, AA, it's not like they're not gonna be there if you take a nap. Get your ass to the food prep block, I made you grub loaf. Crispy as fuck, the way you like it."

Instead of eating it at the block, you'd heated it up and brought the plate as deliberately close to Sollux as possible until his stomach growled. The sound almost made an echo.

"That is it, I'm taking away your visiting privileges," He'd groaned. You'd laughed and sat down to eat.

One of the last days before the Charge debacle. Before the ghosts started taking over and every shade of emerald green made you want to unload your digestion sac on the floor. 

You sit, paralyzed, in the rubble, covered in soot and ash. Caught off guard by the truth:

You've lost him.

\--

Nowadays, all you do is dream.

\--

You see a figure in the distance, glowing bright.

She approaches you with a calm demeanour. Kanaya: all curves and smoothness on the outside, hard muscle hidden under the long sleeves of her shirt and crimson skirt.

“Kanaya,” you say.

“You’re saying my name in an attempt to convince yourself this isn’t a me you’ve conjured up in your mind,” she says. Her voice is cream.

You smile sadly. “Yes.”

You don’t notice you’re crying until she raises a luminescent hand to wipe the tear from your cheek, looking gentle.

“Aradia.”

“Yes.”

“You said you intended to stay alive.”

“Yes.”

“You lied.”

“I’m alive.”

“This is not alive. I would know.” she gives you a bittersweet smile of her own. You want to shrug, you want to say, _what would you understand?_ But the loss of Vriska is still weighted upon her shoulders. Perhaps she suffered every time she looked into a mirror, the girl she loved pouring out of her like water, light in every direction. 

She knows death. But you know it more intimately, far more than she ever will.

“I’ve died a thousand deaths. Don’t talk to me about mortality, Kanaya,” you say, swatting away her hand. Her expression hard as stone. “I know enough.”

“Yes, but do you know who you are?”

“I suppose you do?”

“I _know you_ , Aradia. You’ve died a thousand deaths all for the sake of our lives, even when you think you’ve given up on us. You’d die a thousand more. It is,” she finishes, clipped, “in your nature. So tell me now, why are you still here?”

“You think I want to be stuck here?”

She softens. “I think you are hiding from everything again, like when you were dead. It was easier that way. Everything was…OK. It was OK that you were tricking Sollux. It was OK that you were murdered.”

“What makes you think you know me?”

“I promised I’d help. And, as you know, Aradia, all of this is in your mind. I am you.”

Fury bubbles up in you, somewhere in the inner pits of your bloodpusher. You’d forgotten how it’d been to be angry. Sure, you’d hated yourself; you’d hated Lord English; but all of it had been thickly coated in the disbelief and shock you’d had. Now, this was real.

You grip her by the collar and press your forehead to hers. “You know nothing.”

“I know enough! I know that you, despite all your pretensions, love your friends. I know that you, knowing the consequences, basically got yourself murdered for Tavros. I know Aradia Megido-the girl who would never truly give up on her friends and toss them aside, who has faith in them and herself, so _do you know who you are_ , Aradia? Do you even remember? Or are you still a ghost?”

By the time Kanaya’s said _do you know who you are_ , you’ve put her down on the floor, your hand still ham-fisted around her collar, maroon-diluted tears dripping on the dreamscape.

Kanaya holds your hand.

“I told you,” she said softly, “I’ll help you when you need me.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Wake up.”

\--

You don't. Instead, your dream morphs into something else, as dreams tend to. You're with Kanaya one second, then she's gone the next. There's another figure in place of hers. You look up.

Standing before you: the Green Lady, the Handmaiden of Death. As pure and emerald as any green you've deigned to hate in your life. Her face is the echo of yours, but older, infinitely more vicious and sad, both of them fighting in her face. Lord English told you she was dead, but you and she both know that time is something less linear than most would think.

"You are like me."

"Yes."

Your mouth is as dry as bones.

"You cannot win. You cannot overcome the temporal inevitability of your fate. Give in, little sister. I have tried-hundreds of sweeps more than you can ever fathom-and all you will be, in the end, is broken. Give it up now, while you are still whole. Lord English could use your power. All you have to do is accept his word, pledge your allegiance, and he will make you stronger than you could ever imagine, and you can be free of this prison."

Her voice is so sweet and you are so tired.

There's a thumping heat drilling its way through your horns all the way down to the base of your cranium, and you are young, so young, compared to her-

"No," you whisper.

She narrows her eyes.

"I'm tired of being a puppeteer on time's strings. I'm tired of always faulting everything to temporal inevitability, I'm tired of giving up, I'm tired of _fate_ and _destiny_. I'm going to take control of my own fate. I'm strong enough without some demon. Stronger than most trolls would let me believe."

Your voice is hoarse and raw, but you take a purposeful step forward. Wriggler that you are, she looks almost afraid.

"I have died a hundred deaths, a thousand upon thousand, and I would die even more to get back to the ones I love. Tell your _master_ I serve no one but my friends."

She scowls and disappears in a green mist. For a moment you think you see something flicker in her eyes, hot and burning, but by then she's gone.

You wake up for real this time, sweating and furious, your hands itching for work to be at. It's time to poke and nudge, and

claw your way

out of hell.

 

You think: _the hands. The hands on the clocks. He’s bewitched all of them to look the same, but the one whose hands will not move are mine._

There are at least a thousand clocks in this place. Time to get moving.

Inside your mind, rust tendrils reach out for anything to grasp and it grips the red time symbol still ticking in your head like a cherrybomb. The moment it does your spine goes ram-rod straight. You find yourself wiping away the rust tears with steady hands because all that matters now is the mission.

You move like a snake in between grass through the buildings. Your synapses are on fire and the city is laid out before you like a blueprint, your mind pin-pointing each glowing presence like a firework. Clockwork and destruction; the pivots on which you revolve around.

\--

The process is tedious. You crack every clock’s glass face open and try to move the hands. Each time they give way under your fingers. But you’ve died a thousand deaths. This is easy, compared to that.

At one point your hair gets stuck on the gears and without even thinking about it, you take out a pair of scissors and cuts it to nearly a third of the length it used to be. The hair you grew out for so long falls out in clumps around your feet.

\--

Another cross on your mental map. Nope.

Then one more-

One more-

ONE MORE-

No matter how hard you try, it doesn’t budge. You drop down to where the pendulum is and press your hand to its plinth. The illusion of another nondescript gray clock shatters, replaced by gold and purple.

Every clock in the city begins to chime and the ground under you rumbles like a slumbering monster's stirring.

You rush out past the grimy ruins, the steps covered in moss, each running step more like a leap towards the iron gates that tower over the whole city. You touch them and they're swinging open for you, and before you stand your friends in the flesh. Neither dream fragments, or dead, or-

You take one ginger step before launching yourself at Sollux.

“I saw you dead,” you breathe.

“As we both know, trolls like us don’t fucking stay dead for long,” he says roughly, his lips moving against the matted mane of your hair. He moves to pat it, but comes up short.

“You cut your hair? It looks even more stupid than before!”

At the same time, you both mutter under your breath, “Shut _up_ , Vriska.”

Then Kanaya says, pragmatic as ever, “We have to get out of here,” but not before you ask, “How did you-how did all of you get here?”

“Your ancestor told us where to find you. We’ve been trying to break through ever since.”

You raise your eyebrows. “Where is she?”

Kanaya looks at you and shakes her head.

“We’ve got to get out of here before the demon comes for us.”

“Alright, then,” you say, your resolve hardening and your heart alight with the joy of finding them again, after all this time. And yet, your mind still grim and blood-edged with the task still ahead of you.  “Let’s fly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost-almost didn't post this up, but thought that it would be a waste.  
> I hope you like this.


End file.
